Fulbright Hires Executive Director, Names 2 New Office Heads

HOUSTON — An established law firm leader with 25 years of executive management experience, the majority of it with three major law firms, has joined Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P as the global firm’s new executive director. The firm also has appointed partners to serve as new heads of its offices in Austin, Texas, and Denver.

James K. Dixon joins Fulbright from Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, where he served as the chief of practice development and held other senior administrative positions. Jack Vaughan, the firm’s long-time administrative partner, remains with the firm to support the transition and provide advice on a number of areas of importance to the firm, including tax and risk-management.

In Austin, Butch Hayes is the office’s new partner-in-charge, taking over for Terry Tottenham, who will continue as of counsel to the firm while serving this year as the president of the State Bar of Texas. In Denver, Poe Leggette replaces as partner-in-charge Jeff Dykes, who also will serve in an of counsel capacity.

Dixon will oversee the complete range of administrative departments. He will operate out of Houston and Washington, D.C., while spending a significant portion of his time in the firm’s 14 other domestic and international offices.

Among those Dixon will be working closely with are the firm’s partners-in-charge, including Hayes in Austin and Leggette in Denver.

Hayes oversees nearly 90 lawyers and more than 100 staff members working in Fulbright’s Austin office, where the firm has a strong intellectual property practice and does a full array of legal work ranging from litigation to corporate, regulatory and transactional work for a diverse range of industries, including the health care, insurance, information technology, energy, semiconductor, real estate and development and biotech industries.

Hayes primarily handles employment and business litigation ranging from employment discrimination to shareholder derivative to trade secret and employee raiding suits. He advises clients on a range of employment and business issues and has tried dozens of matters, in various jurisdictions, with a particular emphasis on federal court practice.

In Denver, Leggette will oversee lawyers in the firm’s Denver office, which opened in 2006. Lawyers in the office regularly provide litigation services and energy regulatory and transactional services to domestic and international companies doing business in the Rocky Mountain region.

Leggette heads the firm’s Western Lands and Energy Practice and regularly counsels oil and gas and wind energy companies on obtaining and operating leases on federal and Indian lands. He also defends oil and gas companies accused of violating the False Claims Act.

Leggette has been involved in many significant cases at the trial, appellate and Supreme Court levels regarding ownership of mineral rights, royalty disputes and compliance with environmental statutes.

Founded in 1919, Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P is a leading full-service international law firm with nearly 1,000 lawyers in 16 locations in Austin, Beijing, Dallas, Denver, Dubai, Hong Kong, Houston, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Munich, New York, Riyadh, San Antonio, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. For more information, visit www.fulbright.com.